Cooler Master MasterAir MA410P CPU Cooler Review: An RGB Value Pick

Cooler Master is well known in the PC industry for its extensive line of cases, power supplies, and hardware accessories, but its name won't let you forget the core of its historical business' engineering and development: cooling. With that, we welcomed to our labs the MasterAir MA410P, a quad-heatpipe, single-fan, smaller sibling to the MasterAir MA610.

The MA410P is aimed directly at the thin market line separating "budget" and "enthusiast" CPU air cooling. So, how much cooling potential can we get without breaking the bank?

Cooler Master packages the MA410P with the usual assortment of installation and mounting components to accommodate most current AMD and Intel CPU sockets, although AMD Threadripper is currently not listed as being natively supported. Among the familiar boxed components, most will recognize the spring-loaded "scissor" mounting arms and a dual-purpose AMD/Intel backplate. Cooler Master has also thought well to include a small syringe of its Mastergel Pro thermal compound, although we’ll be utilizing our standard MX-4 paste, as we do for all cooler tests.

The MA410P uses Cooler Master's 120x25mm MasterFan Air Balance RGB fan to move air move over the cooling tower. As the "RGB" suggests, you get 16.7 million possible colors if the fan is connected to a four-pin RGB-capable motherboard or other driver device. If your system happens to be running a bit short on these motherboard headers, Cooler Master has provided a thumb controller for cycling through seven colors, five different brightness levels, and five color patterns to help supply that additional splash of color. The MasterFan Air Balance fan is rated at 66.7 CFM at 2000 RPM and is powered via a four-pin PWM connection. Both the fan tail and the RGB wiring are sleeved in black, braided nylon.

The MasterAir MA410P makes use of six direct-contact copper heatpipes that collect in parallel beneath the aluminum mounting base. The entire CPU contact patch is finished with a fine-grain linear mill, if not quite a mirror finish, and the 6mm-diameter heatpipes integrate seamlessly with the aluminum mounting block. The four heatpipes are slightly offset in pairs to allow airflow to tunnel past and optimize heat dissipation within the cooling tower fins, and the sides of the tower fins remain "open," where some coolers opt to use integrated fin folds to channel air directly through the cooler. This design allows airflow of the MA410P to dissipate from all sides of the cooler.

The aluminum mounting base makes use of a central pivot hole for the "scissor" mounting bracket to allow the cooler to retain stability during installation and use. The aluminum cooling fans are left unfinished for a classic heatpipe cooler look. The top fin plate of the MasterAir MA410P is black anodized aluminum, center-stamped with the Cooler Master logo.

Given that the Cooler Master MasterAir MA410P is a heatpipe tower cooler of rather normal size, motherboard component clearances are almost a non-issue. The cooler sits high enough and has narrow-enough dimensions to not interfere with nearby DIMMs and motherboard voltage regulators. In a dark environment, the RGB lighting provides a strong glow of color that isn’t overpowering or excessive.